Hello everyone, did I mention my new Tobias and Jube comic? I can’t recall. Anyway, it’s called Tobias and Jube and the Something Hat Mystery and the first chapter is up on the Stela app right now! It’ll run for five weeks; one chapter per week. It’s basically 50-something print pages, in total — a little book, like an Asterix book! It is also, would you believe, suitable for all ages. And ‘all ages’ doesn’t mean ‘children’, it means ALL AGES — I’m looking at you, Granddad! You think I can’t see you curled up on the floor behind the recliner? Granddad? Oh, the old silent treatment, eh? The old silent and motionless except for sporadic twitching treatment, is that it, old man? Pathetic.

I’m exceptionally proud of Tobias and Jube and the Something Hat Mystery and excited for you all to enjoy it. It’s not free — you do have to buy it (god, I know) — but at least you can buy it without leaving your house! FRESH LAUGHTER AND NATURAL HUMAN DELIGHTS, EVERY WEEK. And phwoar, look at those gorgeous colours by Lin Visel. Pages of that good stuff. Get into it.

BUT WAIT. Did you think that was all? “Oh, he’s made the funniest comic in the history of the medium, surely that’s enough for one man” — was that you just now?

[shakes head sadly while throwing head backwards in flamboyant laughter]

“I don’t think I’ve smiled this much listening to an album… ever? Ever.”

“I would say this feels like the soundtrack to a mysterious, quirk-laden Japanese PS2 game, but it’s the soundtrack to a wonderful comic!”

“I almost choked on my own snot listening to this. Patrick you are wonderful. My new anthem here.”

“This unironically owns.”

“That record is like some evil corrupt maniac formed the second coming of the Bonzos just to corrupt the minds of children.”

“That was brilliant! … What an inventive track, nice to hear something different.”

Yes, Tobias and Jube and the Something Hat Mystery is also a 30-minute album of amazing songs, subtitled The Euphonious Companion, which makes quite a long and grandiose title altogether, but I promise it’s not prog, IT’S NOT PROG. It is a POP album but WEIRD POP and oh my goodness, remember how the comic is the #1 and sole greatest thing I’ve ever done? Well the album is also the #1 and sole greatest thing I’ve ever done! How is this possible? It’s not. It’s a miracle.

Bandcamp! iTunes and Apple Music! Spotify! Google Play! Soundcloud! And Amazon and Deezer and even Saavn, and other places too — just search for the album. And you can even Shazam all of these songs, which is really cool. If you play my songs at a party, people can go, “Siri, what is this stream of pure, rainbow-flavoured delight? I must know!”

It is a DELIGHTFUL album; that is the word I keep using. You will be delighted. It’s only a short album — go to Bandcamp and have a listen. You will feel delight, I promise. This isn’t cartoonist music, this is cartoonist AND musician music. You’ve been waiting for it, bored with everything else, and now, here it is.

“Patrick I bought the album and subscribed to the comic, I am into this Tobias and Jube thing, help me!”

An all-new, all-ages, all-colour, all-nonsense Tobias and Jube caper! Five chapters over five weeks, from September 25th, only on the Stela app. By the actual Patrick Alexander, with true colours by Lin Visel.

Blobby besties Tobias and Jube find a hat one day, and naturally want answers. Whose is it? What does it do? What’s the proper term for this specific type of headwear? Their square-jawed, glinty-eyed investigation causes setbacks for no less than three local businesses. Meanwhile, a slug and a spider search for the lost wallet of a high-profile client. Also featuring magic, chickens and ice cream, but not at the same time.

I am very proud of this comic; it’s the best thing I’ve ever made! I’m excited for you all to read and enjoy it. Amazing facts about Tobias and Jube and the Something Hat Mystery:

It’s appropriate for all ages. Your beautiful and special and precocious children will love it. You, also, will.

Tobias and Jube began in Australia’s Mania magazine in 2002, making 2017 the comic’s 15th birthday.

It is very funny and silly and it also has themes, but secret themes that only the brightest intellectuals will recognise and enjoy.

It will be accompanied by a short album of songs. Whaaat! Yes, really.

I’m happy to be interviewed about this project by anyone; please get in touch (email, twitter).

The illustration above is available as a print and on assorted products at redbubble.

For two years, from 2013 to 2015, I worked as an ALT (assistant language teacher) at a senior high school in Utsunomiya, Japan. During that time, I put a lot of extra hours into creating illustrated worksheets, games, and other lesson materials for my classes. I shared some with other teachers and got some enthusiastic feedback, so I started compiling and formatting the materials into PDFs, with full instructions so that any teacher could download and use them.

(At the time of writing, there are still some materials yet to be formatted and uploaded. I’ve been busy!)

These lesson materials represent two years of my work as a cartoonist and creator, and include some of the best and most worthwhile illustration I’ve ever done. I even made a board game! So even though it’s not comics, I’d encourage you to take a look, if you follow my work. I feel like this is my humble equivalent of Will Eisner’s army manuals — those actually useful things he made, in between The Spirit and helping to invent the graphic novel.

And along with creating lesson materials, it was also a part of my job to do… The Morning Speech. (Again: Volume 2 yet to come!)

From February 2016, I worked for one year with Square Enix as the English localisation editor for Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius, one of those smartphone gacha RPGs. How about that!

The game is continuing — the story is serialised, and there are regular events, etc. — but I’ve finished working on it as of the end of January 2017.

My job was, basically, to take the initial English translation and make it prettier. The work ranged from straight proofreading to heavy rewriting, depending on the needs (and priority) of the material. Unfortunately, due to technical and organisational issues beyond my control, not all of the game text was even seen by me, let alone edited, so if you play the game, you’ll find that the text, in places, switches back and forth between professional quality and, uh, less-than-professional quality, with no apparent pattern — a fact that will always nag at me, but oh well. The parts I worked on, I improved, and I’m proud of that.

With a tiny few exceptions, I didn’t have the foresight to take screenshots of Patrick’s Greatest Edits as I played through the game. Happily, however, some players were so pleased with the dialogue in the game that they did. So I’ve gathered some bits and pieces from social media, reassembled complete conversations where possible, and plopped them into a gallery for you here. I don’t know how representative it is, but anyway, it’s a taste. Naturally, I’ve only included text that I edited heavily enough that I feel I can reasonably take some credit (or blame) for it, but remember that all of it is the product of a kind of assembly-line collaboration, from the writers, to the translators, to me.

I did my best to give the characters strong, recognisable voices, and to make the dramatic bits more memorable and affecting, but naturally it’s the bits where I enhanced the humour of a scene, or just straight-up added jokes to boring conversations, that are popular with the internet’s assorted screenshot-takers, AND RIGHTLY SO. Thank you, screenshot-takers!

Some sass from Fina

Carbuncle

Lasswell to Carbuncle

Codswallop

I loved this guy

Jake vs Lid 1-1

Jake vs Lid 1-2

Jake vs Lid 2-1

Jake vs Lid 2-2

Jake vs Lid 2-3

Jake in full persona pt 1

Jake in full persona pt 2

I think no-one even noticed this joke; this is one of the few that I screenshotted myself.

I had an extremely busy 2016, and a quite productive one — just not obviously productive; a lot of it was taken up with a new Tobias and Jube comic that I can’t show you yet (among other projects). But I did manage to squeeze in these two lovely illustrations…

Print available. Tobias and Jube come across a garden of eyes whose attention seems to be anywhere else.

I used a pencil for ‘inking’, here, for the first time, which is something I’d wanted to try. It matches the watercolours and feels comfortable to me. (In fact, no actual pencils or paints were involved — both of these illustrations were done entirely on my ipad pro, in Procreate.)

On the whole I take my Christmas thoroughly Anglo, with as many pre-Christian rituals and ornaments as possible bleeding through, but of course also with proper carols, joyful and mysterious, about magic baby God, born to be sacrificed to himself, or, alternatively and ideally, about Wenceslas, a nice king with hot feet. No Santy Claus, no holly jolly jingle dingle, no crooners, no divas. But these are mostly aesthetic preferences; religion and spirituality have something but not so very much to do with it — consequently I’m happy to incorportate whatever ideas and symbols and activities happen to catch my fancy into my personal concept and practice of Yuletide, which is really the only way to do it nowadays, isn’t it?

So what have we got here. We’ve got some carolers who are a bit Peanuts and a bit Dickens. We’ve got some Japanese-style winter illuminations. We’ve got some holly wrapped around an old-as-fuck stone monument of the kind that dot the landscape of Tobias and Jube’s little world. What does it mean? Does anyone remember? And perhaps candles always burn with blue flame at Christmas, which is why no-one’s FREAKED OUT about that. Perhaps it’s got something to do with the Ghost of Christmas Present, or Father Christmas, or whoever it is, lurking in the background there, inspecting the scene with what we should hope is an approving eye. (Or maybe Leroy, the wizard, did it.) The ginkgo tree, like the ones here in Tokyo, is nearly bare at just this time of year. And I wonder if El Bobba, down the front there, is on his way to plop that yuzu into a hot bath, in line with the Japanese winter solstice tradition.

The new Tobias and Jube comic I mentioned earlier? You can meet all the carolers pictured above in that comic. Stay tuned.

オーマイガー！！ Moderately beloved cartoon double act Tobias and Jube have arrived on Line Messenger! WOW your acquaintances and very professional business contacts with this odd, colourful sticker set, featuring a fun mix of English and Japanese.

Technically, these are numbers 54 and 55 in my long-running coaster/postcard project, but the first was coloured partly digitally and I threw out the original because the messed-up colours were so upsettingly ugly, and the second was coloured entirely digitally (and it took bloody hours), so… I feel like we’re quite far removed from the original concept at this point, which was just to doodle Raymondo-type drawings on beer coasters and splash some colour on them later.

Both of these are available to buy as prints via society6 — framed or canvas-ised; big or small; however you want ’em: